Harp of the seas
Aubusson tapestry woven by the Berthaut workshop.
With its bolduc signed by the artist.
1954.
Jean Picart le Doux was one of the great driving forces behind the revival of tapestry. His beginnings in the field date back to 1943: he then made cartoons for the ocean liner “la Marseillaise”. Close to Lurçat, whose theories he adopted (limited tones, Numbered cartoons,…), he was a founding member of the A.P.C.T. (Association of Painter-cartoonists of Tapestry), and soon became a teacher at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts décoratifs. The State commissioned many woven cartoons from him, mostly in Aubusson, and in some cases at the Gobelins: the most spectacular would be those for the University of Caen, the Théâtre du Mans, the ocean liner France, or the Prefecture of the Creuse,…. If the designs by Picart le Doux were close to those of Lurçat, his sources of inspiration and his themes were too, but in a more decorative than symbolic register, where the celestial bodies (the sun, the moon, the stars…), the elements, nature (wheat, vines, fish, birds…), humankind, texts,… stood side by side.
« Harp of the seas » (Bruzeau no. 60), just like its counterpart, « Harp of the forests », of the same format, formed part of an ensemble of Picart le Doux’s cartoons around the themes of the lyre and the harp: the geometric rigor and the graphic power of the parallel cords particularly inspired him. Here, Music and nature were intimately linked (cf. « tree-lyre » of 1953), and « Orpheus » (cartoon of 1952) was the distinctive figure that embodied this assimilation.
Bibliography :
Maurice Bruzeau, Jean Picart le Doux, Murs de soleil, Editions Cercle d’art, 1972
Cat. Exp. Jean Picart le Doux, Musée de la Poste, 1980
